Content sharing services serve content, such as pictures, videos, text, or combinations thereof, to visitors who access the content sharing service. The content may be sourced from a publisher, automatically generated, or uploaded by one of the visitors to the content sharing service. The content may be represented as digitally encoded information. The content sharing service may store the content, or link to other services and subsequently retrieve the content prior to serving the content to the visitors.
The visitor may employ various techniques to access the content. For example, the visitor may access the content sharing service through a browser. In another example, the visitor may access the content sharing service via an application installed on a mobile device. The visitor may use any sort of device enabled to interact with the content sharing service, such as a personal computer, mobile phone, or an Internet enabled television, for example.
The content sharing service may serve content via a third-party service, such as a blog or social networking site. The third-party service may employ an inline frame (iframe) embedded on a personal page, and serve content via the iframe.
In response to a visitor accessing the iframe, the visitor may be served a thumbnail or a static image associated with the content. When the visitor engages an option to play the content, the iframe may invoke a scripted command based language, such Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX), to access the content sharing service to retrieve the content to serve.
The third-party service, such as a social network, may provide dynamically created pages by collaboratively provided content via the various visitors to the third-party service. For example, each registered user with the third-party service may have a publically available page in which commercial entities and other visitors may add content. In certain cases, a page may have added content from multiple sources, such as a friend, a group in which the register user is a member of, and a commercial entity seeking exposure to a product or service.
The content sharing service may serve shared content along with content. The shared content may be served before, during, or after the serving of the content. The shared content may be associated with meta information, and when the shared content is clicked-through by a visitor, the visitor may be redirected to additional content associated with the shared content. The shared content may provide information associated with a product or service related to the content.
The content sharing service may monetize serving the shared content. Specifically, the content sharing service may monetize whether the visitor clicked-through the shared content.
In cases where the content sharing service serves content to a third-party service, the content sharing service may also provide shared content as well. Thus, even though the content is not accessed via a portal set up to access the content sharing service, the content sharing service may still realize the benefits of serving shared content.